He shook his head. “Even better.”
They kissed, then drove off, and at the final stoplight before getting on the freeway, Excel took out his apartment key and flicked it out the window, the morning still so early and quiet that he heard it clink against the asphalt, the sound of everything he no longer needed.
THEIR DESTINATION WAS A BLANK ON THE MAP. THE CLOSEST landmarks were a city called El Centro and a dot of a town called Whyling, near the bottom of California. Once there, they’d head east, to a place called Hello City.
Sab drove; she had the license, the car. Excel’s job was to navigate. He unfolded the California road map and spread it over his lap, then realized he’d never read an actual map before—when you go nowhere your entire life, nothing is more useless than a map. Their flip phones wouldn’t help if they got lost, so Excel tried making sense of all the grids and lines; under the dim car light, the whole state just looked like an arm bent at the elbow, the crisscrossing freeways like networks of veins. But he finally found San Francisco, then Colma, then the 280 freeway, and, finally, maybe, himself: he put a finger on what he estimated was their current position, checking back and forth between the map and the road ahead. He felt like he was tracking his own movement, a kind of out-of-body experience that made him dizzy. His first road trip ever, he didn’t want to get carsick, so he put down the map, told Sab it was a straight shot south for a few hours more and reclined his seat, looked out the window. They passed nothing scenic or memorable, not yet, but he took in every lit-up sign for every strip mall, gas station, and fast food chain they passed, like a tourist determined not to miss a single thing. How could he not: barely an hour outside Colma, Excel was farther from home than he’d ever been before.
THEY’D MET IN JUNE, THREE MONTHS BEFORE. EXCEL WAS LYING ON the grass next to Joker’s grave when a girl holding a ziplock bag filled with what looked like gray powder approached. “Want some?” she asked.
He sat up. She was wearing an army jacket, a black skirt that reached her Doc Martens. Her hair was barely held together in a loose, straggly bun, and her lipstick was gray, nearly black. He thought she was selling him drugs.
“It’s for your monkey face,” she said, shaking the bag.
“For my what?” It was an overcast Saturday, the cemetery nearly empty, which was how he wanted his day off from The Pie, the pizza place where he’d worked since high school.
“Your orchid,” she said. “It’s called a monkey-faced orchid. Look.” She picked it up by the small clay pot, held it to Excel’s face. He hadn’t known the flower was an orchid, much less a specific kind. He’d simply found it on top of the Dumpster behind the cemetery flower shop, thought it was alive enough to lay at Joker’s grave. Up close, he could see how the petals’ maroon splotches, combined with the bulbous flap in the center of the flower, might resemble the face of a monkey, but one that looked surprised, almost panicked.
“Deer eat the flowers at night,” she said. “But if you sprinkle some pepper, they stay away. So”—she offered the bag again—“want some?”
He shrugged. “Why not.”
She took a pinch, sprinkled it over the orchid. “I work at the cemetery flower shop. I put pepper on the flowers a few times a week.”
“I thought you were selling me drugs.”
She shook her head. “My drug mule is on vacation.”
It didn’t register with Excel, not until he saw the slight lift of her eyebrows, signaling the joke. Silence was his default response to any stranger who spoke to him, like he was someone who didn’t know the language. Back in school, teachers had nagged him to speak up, would call him out by name to force his class participation. He had few friends, and the guys he did hang out with, Vic and Truong, weren’t so much into conversation as they were into Grand Theft Auto, and he hadn’t spoken to either since graduation (Vic left for some college in either North or South Carolina; Truong joined a branch of the military, Excel couldn’t remember which). Staring at this girl with a bag of ground pepper in her hand, he realized he hadn’t had a real conversation with anyone in months, maybe longer.
“Well”—he took a breath—“it’s tough to find a good drug mule these days.”
She laughed. “I’m Sab,” she said. He could tell she was mixed—part Asian for sure (he guessed Japanese or Korean), maybe some white, Mexican, or African American, too. She looked like she could be everything.
“Excel,” he said. “Like the spreadsheet.”
“Excel? Excel.” She said his name like it was a word she’d never heard before.
“It’s weird, I know.”
“Totally. I like it.” She held up the ziplock bag, asked if he wouldn’t mind helping her put pepper on the rest of the flowers; the sooner she was done, the sooner she could go home.
He got to his feet. She’d looked taller when he was sitting, but standing up he saw they were about the same height. Looking her in the eye took no effort.
They walked the rows of graves. Most had no flowers, and those that did, Sab pointed out, belonged to the more recently deceased. “Nobody bothers if you’ve been dead for a long time. If my mom had been buried instead of cremated, I’d bring her flowers every day.” It caught him off guard, that a total stranger could reveal something so personal to another, and he wasn’t sure if he should just let the comment slip by, or ask a question so that she could tell him more.
“Sorry for your loss,” he said.
She sprinkled pepper on a sunflower and looked up at him. “Sorry for yours.”
They finished just after five p.m., and without realizing it, Excel walked back to the cemetery flower shop with Sab, stood outside the door as she closed up, then walked her to her car. She thanked him for his help, and before he could find something to say that would prevent them from parting, she said, “Do you like Denny’s?” then took out a two-for-one coupon from her purse. “My treat.”
They drove to the nearest Denny’s, were seated in a family-sized booth in a far corner of the near-empty dining room. Excel couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten in a restaurant with actual menus, and too many options and categories overwhelmed him (breakfast, lunch, and dinner served at the same time, Fit Fare versus Deluxe Dinners, and what were all these slams?). “I’ll just have toast,” he said. But Sab said absolutely not, that ordering toast was a disgraceful use of a two-for-one coupon. “We’re getting patty melts,” she said. The food came quickly, and Excel ate while Sab talked: she’d come to Colma two months before, to live with an aunt in Colma Isles, a trailer community just off the freeway (“Even more glamourous than the press says,” she said). Her mother died when she was seven, her father was a drunk somewhere in Nevada. She had been raised by one grandmother in San Diego, then raised by the other in Sacramento, lived with aunts and uncles some years in between. She had so-so grades but no money for college, so the four-hundred-dollar-a-month bedroom in her aunt’s trailer was, at this point in her life, the best situation she could find.
“And how’s that turning out?” he asked.
“Better today than yesterday.” She reached for his plate, took a fry. He reached for hers, took an onion ring, and said, “Me too.”